Vannacci's party doubles its seats in Italy's parliament
In four months, Futuro Nazionale has drawn deputies away from Meloni's own coalition — a quiet but growing challenge to Italy's governing right.
At a Glance
Futuro Nazionale (National Future), the far-right party founded in February 2026 by retired general and MEP Roberto Vannacci, has doubled its representation in Italy’s Chamber of Deputies, from four seats to eight, after four lawmakers defected from parties inside Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s governing coalition.
Economist Antonio Maria Rinaldi, a former League MEP once floated by Matteo Salvini as a candidate for mayor of Rome, also joined the party as a rank-and-file member.
The party still falls short of the 20 seats required to form an autonomous parliamentary group, but its rise in opinion polls is creating visible friction within the governing coalition.
This image is used for illustrative purposes only.
Four months, eight deputies
It took Roberto Vannacci — a retired divisional general who commanded Italy’s elite Folgore paratroopers brigade and who has served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) since July 2024 — less than four months to turn his party into a magnet for defectors from Italy’s ruling right-wing bloc. On June 6, speaking at a press conference in Viareggio, in the Tuscany region, Vannacci announced that four sitting members of parliament had joined Futuro Nazionale (National Future, FN): Domenico Furgiuele and Gianangelo Bof, both from the Lega (League), the nationalist party led by Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini; and Attilio Pierro and Davide Bergamini, from Forza Italia (Go Italy), the center-right party now led by Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani.
Three of the four had already switched parties once before — Bergamini and Pierro had previously moved from the League to Forza Italia — underscoring the fluid political loyalties on Italy’s governing right.
Futuro Nazionale now holds eight seats in the 400-member Chamber of Deputies and none in the Senate. It remains far below the threshold of 20 seats required to constitute an autonomous parliamentary group. But raw seat counts are not the point. What matters is where the defectors are coming from.
Defectors from inside the tent
The departures strike at the heart of Giorgia Meloni’s three-party governing coalition, which has held power since October 2022. In recent weeks, the League has lost Laura Ravetto, Domenico Furgiuele, and Gianangelo Bof to Vannacci. Forza Italia has lost Pierro and Bergamini. Forza Italia’s national spokesperson Raffaele Nevi chose studied understatement: these are things that happen, he said. Marina Berlusconi, daughter of the party’s founder, has made little secret of her wariness toward far-right excess.
Antonio Maria Rinaldi represents a different kind of loss. An economist and a longstanding voice of Italian euro-skepticism (opposition to deeper European integration and, in some cases, to the euro currency itself), he was publicly proposed by Salvini in January 2026 as a potential candidate for mayor of Rome. His departure is a symbolic blow to the League. He explained his move by pointing to a progressive shift in priorities, language, and objectives within the parties that had built their popularity on monetary and border sovereignty.
How the growth machine works
Futuro Nazionale’s momentum follows a logic familiar from the broader European far-right playbook: capture the voters that the governing right can no longer satisfy once it begins managing the realities of power. By positioning itself in formal opposition to the Meloni government, Futuro Nazionale retains full freedom to attack without accountability for outcomes.
Vannacci announced that membership had risen from 90,000 to 94,000 in a single day — figures provided by the party that cannot be independently verified at this stage. Polling by the Italian survey firm SWG suggested, as of early June, that Futuro Nazionale was closing the gap with the League in voter intentions — a development that, if confirmed at the ballot box, would represent a structural realignment within Italian right-wing politics.
On policy, Vannacci used the Viareggio event to sharpen his platform: he called for a return to open-list voting (a system in which voters choose individual candidates rather than accepting party-determined lists), compared Brussels institutions to Gargantua — the insatiable giant of Renaissance literature — and accused public schools of abandoning Italy’s national cultural identity. Asked about his views on the identity of newly naturalized Italians, a recurring theme in his public statements, he pivoted toward a cultural assimilation argument: the issue, he said, is not ethnicity but the genuine desire to belong to Italian history and culture.
Why this matters beyond Italy
Futuro Nazionale’s rise is a local chapter of a broader European story: the fracture within the far right between a governing wing — which includes Meloni’s own Brothers of Italy, the Rassemblement National (RN) in France, and the Law and Justice party in Poland — and a protest wing that refuses the compromises that come with holding office.
For Meloni, a challenge is now developing on her right flank — the very ground she was thought to have locked down since 2022. The fact that sitting legislators are crossing not toward the center or the left, but toward a harder far-right opposition, is an unusual pattern in contemporary European politics. It suggests the Meloni government could face destabilizing pressure not from its traditional adversaries, but from disaffected allies.
The real question is not whether Vannacci will double his parliamentary numbers again before the next election — it is whether Meloni can hold her line without her radical right imposing an agenda she cannot endorse without alienating her European partners and her own moderate voters.
Sources: Il Post · Open Online · Adnkronos · Il Fatto Quotidiano